The French Lieutenant's Woman (52 page)

He began to understand
Sarah's deceit. She knew he loved her; and she knew he had been blind
to the true depth of that love. The false version of her betrayal by
Varguennes, her other devices, were but stratagems to unblind him;
all she had said after she had brought him to the realization was but
a test of his new vision. He had failed miserably; and she had then
used the same stratagems as a proof of her worthless-ness. Out of
what nobility must such self-sacrifice spring! If he had but sprung
forward and taken her into his arms again, told her she was his,
ungainsayably!

And if only--he might
have added, but didn't--there were not that fatal dichotomy (perhaps
the most dreadful result of their mania for categorization) in the
Victorians, which led them to see the "soul" as more real
than the body, far more real, their only real self; indeed hardly
connected with the body at all, but floating high over the beast; and
yet, by some inexplicable flaw in the nature of things, reluctantly
dragged along in the wake of the beast's movements, like a white
captive balloon behind a disgraceful and disobedient child.

This--the fact that
every Victorian had two minds--is the one piece of equipment we must
always take with us on our travels back to the nineteenth century. It
is a schizophrenia seen at its clearest, its most notorious, in the
poets I have quoted from so often--in Tennyson, Clough, Arnold,
Hardy; but scarcely less clearly in the extraordinary political
veerings from Right to Left and back again of men like the younger
Mill and Gladstone; in the ubiquitous neuroses and psychosomatic
illnesses of intellectuals otherwise as different as Charles Kingsley
and Darwin; in the execration at first poured on the Pre-Raphaelites,
who tried--or seemed to be trying--to be one-minded about both art
and life; in the endless tug-of-war between Liberty and Restraint,
Excess and Moderation, Propriety and Conviction, between the
principled man's cry for Universal Education and his terror of
Universal Suffrage; transparent also in the mania for editing and
revising, so that if we want to know the real Mill or the real Hardy
we can learn far more from the deletions and alterations of their
autobiographies than from the published versions . . . more from
correspondence that somehow escaped burning, from private diaries,
from the petty detritus of the concealment operation. Never was the
record so completely confused, never a public facade so successfully
passed off as the truth on a gullible posterity; and this, I think,
makes the best guidebook to the age very possibly Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. Behind its latterday Gothick lies a very profound and
epoch-revealing truth.

Every Victorian had two
minds; and Charles had at least that. Already, as he walked up Fore
Street towards the Ship, he was rehearsing the words his white
balloon would utter when the wicked child saw Sarah again; the
passionate yet honorable arguments that would reduce her to a tearful
gratitude and the confession that she could not live without him. He
saw it all, so vividly I feel tempted to set it down. But here is
reality, in the form of Sam, standing at the doors of the ancient
inn.

"The service was
hagreeable, Mr. Charles?"

"I ... I lost my
way, Sam. And I've got damnably wet." Which was not at all the
adjective to apply to Sam's eyes. "Fill a tub for me, there's a
good fellow. I'll sup in my rooms."

"Yes, Mr. Charles."

Some fifteen minutes
later you might have seen Charles stark naked and engaged in an
unaccustomed occupation: that of laundering. He had his bloodstained
garments pressed against the side of the vast hip bath that had been
filled for him and was assiduously rubbing them with a piece of soap.
He felt foolish, and did not make a very good job of it. When Sam
came, some time later, with the supper tray, the garments lay as if
thrown negligently half in and half out of the bath. Sam collected
them up without remark; and for once Charles was grateful for his
notorious carelessness in such matters.

Having eaten his supper,
he opened his writing case.

My dearest,
One half of me is
inexpressibly glad to address you thus, while the other wonders how
he can so speak of a being he yet but scarcely understands. Something
in you I would fain say I know profoundly: and something else I am as
ignorant of as when I first saw you. I say this not to excuse, but to
explain my behavior this evening. I cannot excuse it; yet I must
believe that there was one way in which it may be termed fortunate,
since it prompted a searching of my conscience that was long overdue.
I shall not go into all the circumstance. But I am resolved, my sweet
and mysterious Sarah, that what now binds us shall bind us
forevermore. I am but too well aware that I have no right to see you
again, let alone to ask to know you fully, in my present situation.
My first necessity is therefore to terminate my engagement. A
premonition that it was folly to enter into that arrangement has long
been with me--before ever you came into my life. I implore you,
therefore, not to feel guilt in that respect. What is to blame is a
blindness in myself as to my own real nature. Had I been ten years
younger, had I not seen so much in my age and my society with which I
am not in sympathy, I have no doubt I could have been happy with Miss
Freeman. My mistake was to forget that I am thirty-two, not
twenty-two.

I therefore go
early tomorrow on the most painful journey to Lyme. You will
appreciate that to conclude its purpose is the predominant thought in
my mind at this moment. But my duty in that respect done, my thoughts
shall be only of you--nay, of our future. What strange fate brought
me to you I do not know, but, God willing, nothing shall take you
from me unless it be yourself that wishes it so. Let me say no more
now, my sweet enigma, than that you will have to provide far stronger
proofs and arguments than you have hitherto adduced. I cannot believe
you will attempt to do so. Your heart knows I am yours and that I
would call you mine.

Need I assure
you, my dearest Sarah, that my intentions are henceforth of the most
honorable? There are a thousand things I wish to ask you, a thousand
attentions to pay you, a thousand pleasures to give you. But always
with every regard to whatever propriety your delicacy insists on.

I am he who
will know no peace, no happiness until he holds you in his arms
again.

C.S.

P.S. On
re-reading what I have written I perceive a formality my heart does
not intend. Forgive it. You are both so close and yet a stranger--I
know not how to phrase what I really feel.

Your fondest C.

This anabatic epistle
was not arrived at until after several drafts. It had by then grown
late, and Charles changed his mind about its immediate dispatch. She,
by now, would have wept herself to sleep; he would let her suffer one
more black night; but she should wake to joy. He re-read the letter
several times; it had a little aftermath of the tone he had used,
only a day or two before, in letters from London to Ernestina; but
those letters had been agony to write, mere concessions to
convention, which is why he had added that postscript. He still felt,
as he had told Sarah, a stranger to himself; but now it was with a
kind of awed pleasure that he stared at his face in the mirror. He
felt a great courage in himself, both present and future--and a
uniqueness, a having done something unparalleled. And he had his
wish: he was off on a journey again, a journey made doubly delicious
by its promised companion. He tried to imagine unknown Sarahs-- a
Sarah laughing, Sarah singing, Sarah dancing. They were hard to
imagine, and yet not impossible ... he remembered that smile when
they had been so nearly discovered by Sam and Mary. It had been a
clairvoyant smile, a seeing into the future. And that time he had
raised her from her knees--with what infinite and long pleasure he
would now do that in their life together!

If these were the thorns
and the stones that threatened about him, he could bear them. He did
think a moment of one small thorn: Sam. But Sam was like all
servants, dismissable.

And summonable. Summoned
he was, at a surprisingly early hour that next morning. He found
Charles in his dressing gown, with a sealed letter and packet in his
hands.

"Sam, I wish you to
take these to the address on the envelope. You will wait ten minutes
to see if there is an answer. If there is none--I expect none, but
wait just in case--if there is none, you are to come straight back
here. And hire a fast carriage. We go to Lyme." He added, "But
no baggage. We return here tonight."

"Tonight, Mr.
Charles! But I thought we was--" "Never mind what you
thought. Just do as I say." Sam put on his footman face, and
withdrew. As he went slowly downstairs it became clear to him that
his position was intolerable. How could he fight a battle without
information? With so many conflicting rumors as to the disposition of
the enemy forces? He stared at the envelope in his hand. Its
destination was flagrant: Miss Woodruff, at Endicott's Family Hotel.
And only one day in Lyme? With portmanteaux to wait here! He turned
the small packet over, pressed the envelope.

It seemed fat, three
pages at least. He glanced round surreptitously, then examined the
seal. Sam cursed the man who invented wax.

And now he stands again
before Charles, who has dressed.

"Well?"

"No answer, Mr.
Charles."

Charles could not quite
control his face. He turned away.

"And the carriage?"

"Ready and waitin',
sir."

"Very well. I shall
be down shortly."

Sam withdrew. The door
had no sooner closed when Charles raised his hands to his head, then
threw them apart, as if to an audience, an actor accepting applause,
a smile of gratitude on his lips. For he had, upon his ninety-ninth
re-reading of his letter that previous night, added a second
postscript. It concerned that brooch we have already seen in
Ernestina's hands. Charles begged Sarah to accept it; and by way of a
sign, to allow that her acceptance of it meant that she accepted his
apologies for his conduct. This second postscript had ended: "The
bearer will wait till you have read this. If he should bring the
contents of the packet back ... but I know you cannot be so cruel."

Yet the poor man had
been in agony during Sam's absence.

And here Sam is again,
volubly talking in a low voice, with frequent agonized looks. The
scene is in the shadow of a lilac bush, which grows outside the
kitchen door in Aunt Tranter's garden and provides a kind of screen
from the garden proper. The afternoon sun slants through the branches
and first white buds. The listener is Mary, with her cheeks flushed
and her hand almost constantly covering her mouth.

"'Tisn't possible,
'tisn't possible."

"It's 'is uncle.
It's turned 'is "ead."

"But young
mistress--oh, what'll 'er do now, Sam?"

And both their eyes
traveled up with dread, as if they thought to hear a scream or see a
falling body, to the windows through the branches above.

"And bus, Mary.
What'll us do?"

"Oh Sam--'tisn't
fair ..."

"I love yer, Mary."

"Oh Sam ..."

"'Tweren't just
bein' wicked. I'd as soon die as lose yer now."

"Oh what'll us do?"

"Don't cry, my
darling, don't cry. I've 'ad enough of hupstairs. They're no better'n
us," He gripped her by the arms. "If 'is lordship thinks
like master, like servant, 'e's mistook, Mary. If it's you or 'im,
it's you." He stiffened, like a soldier about to charge. "I'll
leave 'is hemploy."

"Sam!"

"I will. I'll 'aul
coals. Hanything!"

"But your money--'e
woan' give'ee that no more now!"

"'E ain't got it to
give." His bitterness looked at her dismay. But then he smiled
and reached out his hands.

"But shall I tell
yer someone who 'as? If you and me play our cards right?"
 

50

I think it
inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are
formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer,
and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition
with  those undergoing modification and improvement will
naturally suffer most.
--
Darwin,
The Origin of Species (1859)

They had arrived in Lyme
just before two. For a few minutes Charles took possession of the
room he had reserved. Again he paced up and down, but now in a
nervous agony, steeling himself for the interview ahead.
The
existentialist terror invaded him again; perhaps he had known it
would and so burned his boats by sending that letter to Sarah. He
rehearsed again the thousand phrases he had invented on the journey
from Exeter; but they fled through his mind like October leaves. He
took a deep breath, then his hat, and went out.